Defense Documents

David Irving: A Political Self-Portrait: Electronic Edition

1.1 Jewish responsibility for anti-Semitism/ pogroms/ Holocaust

[1.1/A]'Why are they [the Jews] so blind that they can not see the linkage between cause and effect? They protest, "What, Us?" when people accuse them of international conspiracy. They clamour "Ours! Ours! Ours!" when hoards of Gold are uncovered. And then when antisemitism increases and the inevitable mindless pogroms occur, they ask with genuine surprise: "Why us?"' ['A Radical's Diary' - Action Report no. 12 - July 1997, p. 22: K4, Tab. 10, p. 60 (at 1)].

[1.1/B]IRVING: [....] But, if somebody says to the Jewish community, "We think you're a liar," suddenly the jail doors are swung open and people say "This way! Come on! You've called them a liar." And this I think does harm to the Jewish people in the long run, because the non-Jewish people will say, "What is it about these people?" I am deeply concerned about this, and I've said this to people like Daniel Goldhagen, who I challenged to the debate at a meeting in New Orleans a few months ago. I said, "You've written a book called 'Hitler's Willing Executioners'. You've talked to us this evening at great length about who pulled the trigger. But the question which would concern me, if I was a Jew, is not who pulled the trigger, but why? Why are we disliked? Is it something we are doing? I'm disliked. David Irving is disliked. I know that, because of the books I write. I could be instantly disliked by writing - I could become instantly liked by writing other books. You people are disliked on a global scale. You have been disliked for 3,000 years and yet you never seem to ask what is at the route of this dislike. You pretend that you're not disliked but you are disliked. No sooner do you arrive as a people in a new country then within 50 years you are already being disliked all over again. Now, what is it? And I don't know the answer to this. Is it built into our micro chip? When a people arrive who call themselves 'The Jews' you will dislike them; is there something in our micro chip? Is it in our micro chip that we don't like the way they look? Is it envy because they are more successful than us? I don't know the answer. But, if I was a Jew I would want to know what the reason is, why I'm being disliked. And not just disliked in a kind of nudge, nudge, wink, wink, he's not very nice kind of sort of way. But we are being disliked on a visceral, gut-wrenching, murderous level, that no sooner do we arrive then we are being massacred, and beaten, and brutalised and imprisoned, until we have to move on somewhere else. What's the reason?" I would want to know the answer to that, and nobody carries out an investigation about that.

INTERVIEWER: What would you say the reason is?

IRVING: Well, I'm just looking at this as an outsider. I come from Mars and I would say they're clever people. I'm a racist. I would say they're a clever race. I would say that as a race they are better at making money than I am. That's a racist remark, of course. But they appear to be better at making money than I am. If I was going to be crude, I would say not only are they better at making money, but they are greedy. I don't care about money. I don't give a hoot about money. As long as I've got enough money to pay the school fees and the grocer's bills, I don't mind. To me, money is not the most important thing. But the perception that the world has of the Jewish people is one of greed, and they contribute to that by their behaviour. They contribute to that, for example, in recent years by their behaviour over the Swiss gold business. It is a curious kind of vague clamour that has begun. We are not quite sure what the clamour is about. Is it about unclaimed bank accounts? Is it about gold that has been transferred from Nazi Germany to Switzerland? Is it about gold teeth and gold rings? Is it about insurance that they can't claim on? But suddenly the clamour is there. Fifty hears after the War, an enormous clamour is being beaten up by the New York Jewish community, by Edgar Bronfman, for example, or by the Anti-Defamation League, and here it has to be said that the number of wise Jews - you'll notice I don't include them as the "wise Jews" -the number of wise Jews, the English Jews, the Swiss Jews, for example, are expressing profound concern about the long term effects of this clamour. They are saying, "This is just going to nourish the neo-Nazi stereotype of the Jew - grasping, gold hungry, greedy, inconsiderate, vengeful; all these anti-Semitic stereotypes that the neo-Nazis have are just being nourished by this latest clamour about the Swiss gold."'[P interview with Errol Morris - 8 November 1998 - K4, Tab. 9, pp. 25-27]

[1.1/C]'And Tom McCormack, the Chairman of St. Martin's Press, said, "What we didn't like about the Goebbels' book, when I read it, was the notion that they had it coming to them" - They had it coming to them; the Jewish community, the Jews of Germany had it coming to them! And I was very indignant at that. I thought, that wasn't in the book. That wasn't the sense of the book. But then, as I thought about it, I thought, well, he may be right, because you're reproducing a lot of what Dr. Goebbels, who was the dynamo behind the Holocaust, he was the one who goaded Hitler on to issuing the orders for the Yellow Star, and all that kind of thing; you're goading him - No, Hitler's goading him on. I've quoted his private diaries. We have watched Goebbels turning from a young innocuous intelligent, rather hypersensitive, lame student of late teens and early twenties at Heidelberg University, when he had no feelings against the Jews whatsoever - in fact he wrote a letter to his private, to his girl friend, criticising her for having made some cheap shot against the Jews in a letter to him, and he writes a letter to her, angrily attacking her - to the time when he arrives in Berlin and he becomes viciously anti-Jewish in consequence. And the American Jews didn't like that because it did rather look like they had it coming to them. It changed him. The entire Germans were changed also. And, therefore, the Jews were in some way to blame themselves. This was not my intention with the book. But if that is the way the Germans were, then it needs to be said. You can't just pass a sponge over it and pretend it wasn't like that. That's not the way to write history. You have to write what you find.' [P interview with Errol Morris - 8 November 1998: K4, Tab. 9, p. 42]

[1.1/D][Commenting on the desire of the German Ministry of Justice to increase the punishment for Holocaust denial to three years imprisonment Irving approvingly quoted Goebbels] 'How ill considered: Was it not Dr Goebbels himself who wrote in his diary, applauding efforts by another country to introduce an identical law during the war itself, these words: "The more the Jews get these special laws passed around the world, the more anti-Semitism there is as a result."' ['Law Report', Action Report, September 1994, p. 10: K4, Tab. 10, p. 37]

[1.1/E][On the cancellation of the publishing contract by St. Martins Press] 'This kind of action by the organised Jewish community can only lead to an increase in anti-Semitism because the general public will regard it as the Jews throwing their weight around again.' ['The Life and Death of "Dr Goebbels"', Action Report, number 10, 5 July 1996, p. 6: K4, Tab. 10, p. 55]

[1.1/F]'And gradually the word is getting around Germany. Two years there from now too, the German historians will accept that we're right. They will accept that for fifty years they have believed a lie. And then there will come about a result, not only in Germany but around the world, which I deeply regret and abhor. There will be an immense tidal wave of anti-Semitism. It is an inevitable result. And when people point an accusing finger at me and say, "David Irving you are creating anti-Semitism," I have to say it is not the man who speaks the truth who creates the anti-Semitism, it's the man who invented the lie of the legend in the first place. [Applause] [P speech at Bayerische Hof, Milton, Ontario, 5 October 1991, p. 15: K3, Tab. 10, p. 15]

[1.1/G]'But if I ever become an anti-Semite it will be their [the Jews who have campaigned against him] fault and if the Australian public has become more anti-Semitic as a result of what they have seen over the last few days, this kind of publicity campaign that was generated against me then once again it will be not my fault, but it will be the fault of Mr Jeremy Jones, Mr Michael Marks [unintelligible name] and all the other, the Rubensteins and all the other commentators and letter writers and authors and journalists and politicians and people who have tried to put pressure on the fair Australian government to suppress freedom of speech.' ['The Search for Truth in History -Banned!' 1993, p. 27:K3, Tab. 15, p. 27]

[1.1/H]PRESENTER: At times in your speech to these groups you speak at, you ask if the Jews have ever looked at themselves.

IRVING: Yes.

PRESENTER: To find a reason for the pogroms and the presentation and the extermination. In other words you're asking "did they bring it on themselves?"

IRVING: Yes.

PRESENTER: Thereby excusing the Germans, the Nazi's.

IRVING: Why... well, let us ask that simple question, why does it always happen to the Jews?

PRESENTER: But isn't that an ugly, racist sentiment?

IRVING: It is an ugly, of course it's an ugly, racist sentiment, of course it is, you're absolutely right but we can't just say therefore let's not discuss it, therefore let's not open that can of worms in case we find something inside there which we're not going to like looking at. ['Cover Story' (Australian television) Sunday 4 March 1997, p. 7: K4, Tab. 8, p. 7]

[1.1/I]INTERVIEWER: And you're telling the Germans that the truth they thought they had before was true, that much of our institutions are controlled by the Jews.

IRVING: The specific institutions I referred to, yes. Well, if you remember when the Nazis came to power, which was in 1933, Dr. Goebbels made a great deal of mileage out of the fact that certainly in Berlin, the Berlin that he arrived at in 1926, that was very largely dominated by the Jewish lawyers, the Jewish politicians, the Jewish police chiefs, the Jewish ministers and so on. And he made a lot of mileage out of that and it was a very unhealthy political situation for Germany. In fact, the odd thing is before Goebbels came to Berlin in 1926 he wasn't anti-Jewish. He turned anti-Jewish by what he saw.

INTERVIEWER: Well I'll put one point to you. We've interviewed a number of skinheads, German and British, who've been responsible for some violent attacks on people, stabbings and woundings, that kind of thing. Among the things they tell us are that are that the gas chambers were a lie and that they have read the works of Mr. Leuchter and your works and they tell them that. Are you happy that your works spread like this?

IRVING: Millions of people have read my works, and I'm not surprised that a number of skinheads, or former skinheads, or future skinheads have read them. It doesn't surprise me at all. In fact I would be surprised if they hadn't read them. And I'd be rather depressed if they weren't convinced and impressed by what I wrote. Why shouldn't they be?

INTERVIEWER: Well I'll go back to my previous question.

IRVING: But I mean that your question basically is, 'Do you not feel worried that what you are writing may be generating feelings that may be leading to violence?'

INTERVIEWER: Absolutely.

IRVING: Okay. If I may phrase your question for you. To which my standard retort always is, the person who's guilty of these feelings and for that violence, is not the person who writes the truth it's the person who writes the lie that the truth corrects. [P interview for 'This Week', 28 November 1991: K3, Tab 12, pp. 9-10]

[1.1/J]'And in Baton Rouge, Louisiana two years ago this half of the audience was entirely made up of Jewish hecklers who had decided to disrupt the meeting, not from outside but to come in, infiltrate the audience and as soon as I began speaking they began barracking and harassing much to the anger of the rest of the audience who wanted to hear what I had to say. And eventually I said to the ringleader, who came from North London, that anecdote, I know why I'm not liked. And I said to him "you people aren't liked either. But you're not liked on a global scale, on a Millennium scale. You haven't been liked for thousands of years and you don't ask yourselves the question why. Maybe there's no answer, I don't know. You're not just disliked in the way that I'm disliked, that you get bad reviews in newspapers. You're disliked in the way that people put you into concentration camps and line you up at the edge of tank pits and machine gun you into them. You're victims of pogroms and you're harassed and hounded and made to move from country to country to country and you never ask yourselves "Why us? Is it something we are doing. Is it a perception that people have of us that makes us unpopular?" I don't, I have to say at this point in the meeting that I don't know the answer and I cannot offer you an answer. But there must be some reason and if you want to prevent Holocausts, really this is the question that has to be answered, not just the question of what happened by why it happened. Why one nation can turn on its Jews or on its gypsies or on some other little faction who they can identify as a scapegoat and ruthlessly and inhumanely dispose of them. And there is something of the answer in Dr Goebbels' diaries.' [P speech in Oakland, California, 10 September 1996: K4, Tab. 7, pp. 14-15]